Texture is missing in Cycles?
The problem is that your texture does not have any mapping defined.

To fix this, you can either UV unwrap your object, or use the Texture coordinates node.

To UV unwrap a UV sphere, all you need to do is:


Select your sphere and enter Edit Mode (Tab)
Select all (A)
Press U>Sphere projection while in side view.


For more info on UV unwrapping, see this post.



There are also ways to map images without UV unwrapping, such as Blended Box Mapping:



The Mapping node is used to scale up the texture.